Flydubai Cockpit Attacker Had Been Barred From Flight Training Over 'Radical Views'

On the last day of September, aboard Flydubai flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Israel, the co-pilot waited for the cruise phase — the calmest stretch of a pilot's day — and attacked. Hamam Hamami, a 30-year-old Omani in the right-hand seat, stabbed his captain with the crash axe, then pushed the controls forward. The aircraft fell 5,000 metres in roughly thirty seconds, and the violence of the manoeuvre tore the rudder from its tail. Passengers subdued him, with decisive help from an Israeli plumber among them who had watched enough air-crash documentaries to know what to grab. The jet diverted to Tabuk in Saudi Arabia, where the story first broke.

What kind of person was sitting in that seat has occupied Chinese and Hong Kong readers all week. This week brought the fullest answer yet. China News Weekly says it recovered the complete archive of a deleted social-media account that CNN linked to Hamami: more than 3,000 posts, forwards and replies from 2021 and 2022, written mostly in Arabic, with selfies and job details matching what is publicly known of the co-pilot.

For two years the account did little but rage at women. Hamami insisted they be “chaste, modest, veiled” and opposed men and women working alongside each other. Much of it circled his own prospects on the marriage market: he wanted a Saudi bride who met his conditions, and could not find one. “They all refused,” he wrote in February 2022. “Then my mother told them, ‘My son is a pilot’ — and suddenly they all agreed.” By that autumn he was still looking, lamenting that he carried “a Saudi Arabia in my heart” yet had found no woman who qualified, while admitting in a quarrel with another user that he had “never touched a girl” in his life. He was so invested in the thesis that Saudi women were being lured away by foreign men — Syrians above all — that he opened a fake account posing as a Syrian migrant to test them, and concluded they were being “cheated of their money, eaten, then fed to the dogs.”

A caution on the numbers: the trending hashtag spoke of “3,000 misogynist messages”, and one Weibo commentator pushed back hard, noting the account held about 3,000 posts in total and calling the compression sensationalist. The distinction matters less than the substance — the magazine's own reading was that nearly all of it focused on attacking women — but it is a fair reminder that a two-year archive is being squeezed into a headline.

The graver detail arrived with it. Before 2025, according to the report, Hamami's flight training was cancelled after he was flagged for “radical views”, and he was moved into a ground role at Oman Air, his airline at the time. Israeli officials told media his online trace pointed to a drift toward jihadist ideology, and a former Israeli intelligence colonel, Miri Eisin, has speculated publicly that Iran may be cultivating radicalised pilots as a new kind of attack — while stressing that no direct evidence exists and the investigation is open.

That history reframes the question the region is now asking about its cockpits. After the 2015 Germanwings crash, regulators required psychological screening at entry and annual check-ups that ask directly about depression and suicidal thoughts — but, as HK01's industry reporting notes, pilots' medicals are tied to their livelihoods, and problems tend to stay hidden. How a man already flagged once returned to line flying is what the investigation must now answer.

The story's one uncontested hero has been rewarded: Netanyahu has invited the wounded captain to Israel as a guest of honour, proposing he light next year's Independence Day beacon alongside Narendra Modi — a role normally reserved for Israeli citizens. What the screening system owes the 174 people in the back is still an open file.